Do you envision a world without waste? You can start with a pair of jeans
Photo by Mud Jeans
Going to a fashion trade show for the first time can be breathtaking! Pure London showcases 800 brands from all over the world with over 10,000 visitors attending each season. The atmosphere is vibrant and the variety of clothes on display can be mesmerising, but the brand that immediately captured our imagination amongst this cornucopia of fashion was MUD jeans. The brand founded in 2012 by Bert van Son – currently CEO of MUD jeans – truly embeds the concept of circular economy (1) and offers stylish, classy and timeless cuts we fell in love with. All MUD jeans are made from 40% recycled content derived from discarded jeans (and they are working with several partners on technologies to increase the percentage of recycled cotton), with the remaining material being organic cotton and GOTS certified cotton. In the recycling process old jeans are pulled apart and shredded into small pieces, after which they are blended with virgin cotton for strength and performance and are spun into new yarns. Both dyeing and finishing (e.g. worn-in effect) are done according to the most sustainable technologies and no leather label is applied to make the items fully recyclable once they are returned to the company. Even the return process has been made sustainable. MUD jeans in fact have partnered with RePack, which makes reusable packaging that can be returned simply by dropping it into any post box, anywhere in the world and free of charge. Once the packaging is returned, a 10% discount voucher is issued and it can be used in for purchasing any item that is delivered using RePack.
Both the manufacturing process and the process put in place to return the old jeans for recycling make MUD jeans an unique, forward-thinking company, but that is not all. The MUD jeans team is visionary and truly pioneering, and questioned the very idea of owning a pair of jeans: “Do we really need to own one pair of jeans for life? Or could we wear our jeans and send them back after use?”. MUD jeans’ answer to this question lead to the launch of the Lease A Jeans concept in 2013. The key driver behind the lease programme is that MUD jeans want to be sure to get the jeans back after use. As for Today, MUD jeans have 5.000 leasers and the number is growing proving that consumers are loving the idea.
To learn more or buy MUD jeans visit: https://mudjeans.eu/
To learn more about circular economy: https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy and watch the videos: https://youtu.be/zCRKvDyyHmI, https://youtu.be/Cd_isKtGaf8 and https://youtu.be/yPZFNvrnO4E
(1) A circular economy is an alternative to a traditional linear economy (make, use, dispose) in which we keep resources in use for as long as possible, extract the maximum value from them whilst in use, then recover and regenerate products and materials at the end of each service life (Source:WRAP)
Bert van Son – CEO of MUD Jeans